—Odd enough!—at the moment when your No. 116. reached me, a volume of the State Poems was before me, in which I read the very epigram to which your correspondent alludes, where it thus stands:—
"ELEGY ON COLEMAN.
"If heaven be pleased, when sinners cease to sin,
If hell be pleased, when souls are damned therein,
If earth be pleased, when its rid of a knave,
Then all are pleased, for Coleman's in his grave."
State Poems, vol. iii. 1704.
Qy. Who was Coleman?
JAMES CORNISH.
[We are indebted to another correspondent, LOUISA JULIA NORMAN, for pointing out the same epigram on Coleman in The Panorama of Wit (1809). Coleman, on whom the epigram appears to have been originally written, is obviously the Jesuit of that name executed in the reign of Charles II.]